Let me put it this way: until people of color are no longer considered abnormal, foreign, or exotic, America is NOT a multicultural society. Until people no longer tell us to ‘go back to our country’, in some cases forcing us to return to a country that is not our home simply because the immigration process is so flawed that undocumented people are branded with an adjective and immediately turned into a noun: ILLEGAL. For those of us who have parents and ancestors who shed enough blood, sweat, and tears to fill the oceans thirty times over just to get to this country and build a life for their families, we belong. We belong to this country that exotifies our people, our food, our culture. We belong to this country that pokes and prods us, asking what we are and complimenting us on our English when for many of us, it is the only language we speak. We belong to a country that blocked us out, refused us citizenship, upholds laws that ban us from owning land, rounded us up in internment camps, fights legislature that shatters the limbo for undocumented students, stole our property and possessions, prohibited interracial marriage until a mere 50 years ago. We belong to this country and we fight to be here on a daily basis. We have a right to be here because we are Americans. I am just as American as the blonde haired blue eyed girl sitting next to me, I am not a hyphen separating me from the ‘norm’. We live in White America and until this is recognized as the reality, it cannot change.
